Fight the school-board lobby

First
God created idiots," wrote Mark Twain. "That was for practice. Then he
created school boards." Is it time to undo God's work, and abolish district school boards? Around the
nation, education-reform activists, such as Arizona State
Superintendent of Public Instruction Lisa Graham, are suggesting that
states should just hand over education funding directly to the local
schools, instead of passing the money through a school-district
bureaucracy.

According to scholars John Chubb and Terry Moe of the liberal
Brookings Institution, school boards are a major obstacle to education
reform. Because of the heavy spending and strong volunteer effort of
the teachers' unions, school boards tend to be controlled by members
who owe their jobs to the union.

For instance, in a typical school-board election in Jefferson County,
Colo. (the state's most heavily populated county), the Colorado
Education Association (CEA) spends over $50,000 on its candidates,
while candidates opposed by the CEA are forced to run a county-wide
race on a budget of only $5,000.

There's nothing wrong with the CEA spending its money on politics, and
it would a free-speech infringement to attempt to drive the CEA out of
politics through campaign-spending limitations. But the CEA's ability
to control school boards becomes problematic when union needs clash
with student needs — such as when rigid rules make it nearly
impossible to fire incompetent teachers.

Indeed, the rigidity imposed by school boards is often harmful to
high-quality teachers. For example, in the Boulder Valley School
District (next to Jefferson County, Colo.), School Board President
Stan Garnett announced that race could never become the subject of scientific inquiry by students. He shut
down a science-fair project by a third-grade girl who had studied
whether adults and children thought a black Barbie prettier than a
white Barbie — or whether people simply preferred the Barbie with the
better dress.

Next there's the problem of bureaucratic centralization. There is no
way that a board of from five to seven individuals — no matter how
brilliant and altruistic — could possibly create the best educational
experience for each and every child in their district.

Consider the Jefferson and Denver County School Districts. Together
these two districts "serve" almost a quarter of the entire school
population in the state. That means that a total of 12 people set the
conditions to hire all the teachers, build all the buildings, set the
curriculum, and spend all the tax dollars for the education of some
140,000 children.

When all schools in a large school district have to follow the same
policy, set by a single board, parents and students don't get the kind
of education they want. For example, the school-board elections in
Littleton, Colo. have involved huge fights between advocates of
academic fundamentals and advocates of "outcome-based" education. In
Boulder, control swings back and forth between a CEA faction that
despises charter schools and opposes enriched classes for advanced
students in middle school and a group of insurgents who desire a
diversity of schools, and want kids to be able to progress as fast as
they can. (The reigning faction is the anti-diversity,
anti-advancement group.) Accordingly, no matter who wins the election,
a large number of parents and students will lose, since the whole
district gets run by a philosophy that runs counter to students'
academic interests.

Some boards do recognize that they must at least pay lip service to
the demands for decentralization, but very rarely does a board devolve
real power to the parents and faculty of a local school. Even in
Denver's highly touted "collaborative decision-making" model (which
involves parents in school decisions), no school team can contract out
for education services or hire and fire teachers or control most of
the spending in the school.

Despite Mark Twain's quip, school boards used to get a lot more
respect about a century ago. Then, school districts were much smaller,
and school boards really were instruments of democratic, community
involvement in the schools.

But today, the school boards of the huge, consolidated school
districts wrest power away from local communities. In the massive
Jefferson County school district, voters in Lakewood have no burning
interest in electing the people charged with governing the public
schools in faraway Golden? (And vice versa.)

The school-board lobby (e.g., the Colorado Association of School
Boards (CASB)) and its legislative allies raise three main objections
to handing over the state's educational funds directly to local
schools.

First, the state might lose federal-education funding, they fear,
since certain federal grants must be given to school boards, not to
individual schools. True, but this is just an argument to shift
federal education funding toward a less-restrictive block-grant
program. In any case, the cost of complying with federal mandates and
paperwork eats up many of the benefits of federal support.

Second, large, centrally governed school districts supposedly create
economies of scale. CASB's executive director compared school
districts to Wal-Mart, with its large purchasing power. But being big
isn't the same as being efficient. Wal-Mart has competitors, while
school boards have a quasi-monopoly. If centralized control always
produced economies of scale, the Soviet Union would have been the
richest country on earth.

Besides, independently owned companies can and do compete with
Wal-Mart by forming voluntary-purchasing cooperatives. Without school
boards, individual schools could work together to buy desks and chalk
in bulk. Without school boards, principals of individual schools would
be free to fire incompetent teachers, reward the best teachers with a
year-end bonus, and spend money to repair the gymnasium — without
having to send reams of paper to the school-district office begging
for permission.

Without school boards, local schools would have more money, since
state aid wouldn't be siphoned off by an intermediary bureaucracy.

Finally, some states, including
Colorado, constitutionally mandate that state aid to education
will be funneled through school boards, and that school districts will
be the main revenue generators of local-property taxes. So, full
abolition of school districts in some states would probably require a
state constitutional amendment.

Yet even without a constitutional amendment, most state legislatures
have the authority to re-draw school-district boundaries. Legislatures
could therefore split the monster school districts into much smaller
pieces that would comprise genuine communities; so, at the very least,
medium-sized cities could have their own school district. Indeed,
large cities could have several school districts. As University of
Colorado economist (and Independence Institute Senior Fellow)
Barry Poulson has detailed, the consolidation of small school
districts into mega-districts has played an important role in the
decline of educational quality.

Just ask yourself. If you were charged with the responsibility of
creating an education system and if you had no model on which you
could rely, would you design the present system? Would you give all
the resources to a few people? Would you consider the possibility that
allowing schools to control the economic resources available to them
would encourage more effective allocations of those resources — and
better learning?

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